Understanding Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master Math in Baldur's Gate 3!

I got a lot of comments telling me to turn off Sharpshooter at 40 shots this is wrong if I turn off Sharpshooter here I do less damage on average we also call it DPR damage per round don't believe me well let's do some math then this math is really valuable to know for any Sharpshooter or great weapon Master build out there for Baldur's Gates I highly recommend knowing this welcome to back tactics where we account for accuracy in our math let's just start Flynn has 16 AC I have a plus one hand crossbow with 17 dexterity if I shoot normally I do 1d6 plus 4 damage and at this point I have a 65 percent to hit on a straight roll it even shows me on the screen which saves me a lot of work the average damage accounting for accuracy for that single shot is 5.05 the 5 times 3.5 that's crit itself for now we're gonna skip that part the reason why is because the crit chance and the crit damage stays the same whenever you use Sharpshooter or not so adding the crit here is not really helpful but this is the correct way to find the correct average in this game from now on when I say average damage assume without crits so then we get this 65 times 7.5 equals 4.87 the 7.5 is the average damage we do on a hit we can calculate this in two ways I'm used to looking at the 1d6 plus 4 here the average result of a D6 is 3.5 so we do 3.5 plus 4. the reason why it's four is because we're getting plus three from our dexterity modifier and plus one from our hand crossbow we get 7.5 alternatively and I think this is what you guys are gonna do we look at the minimum them and maximum damage on a hit over here which is 5 to 10. we can just take the average of that instead of summing up the two numbers and dividing it by two as you can see we get 7.5 again easy as a reminder a single normal shot does on average 4.87 damage if I shoot with Sharpshooter my chance to hit lowers to 40 percent if you aren't rolling a disadvantage it will always be 25 percent lower than the normal shots anyways we add 10 to our damage so we get this it's seven seven average damage now we compare this to the normal shots clearly the expected value of shooting at forty percent with Sharpshooter is more damage than shooting normally well cool bold when the shop should have not worth you using when should I shoot normally this is Gator by the way I don't think you guys have met him yet hi you can calculate this in at least two ways you could always redo the two calculations one with the higher accuracy and one with the lower one fight any enemy and it shows you the percentage on the screen you just toggle Sharpshooter on and off to see the percentages and then you just pull out your phone or just use your computer calculator and calculate it and if you find out that the normal shots does more average damage than the Sharpshooter shots then use the normal shots easy but before I talk about the other method this video is sponsored by Gilman's guide to speed the guys over at only crits are making a source 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time with this one back to the video now for the other method the breaking points where Sharpshooter is no longer worth it I'll explain how to do this with straight rolls let's figure out our hit chance X without Sharpshooter we have this as you can tell the left hand side is without Sharpshooter and the right hand side is with Sharpshooter we multiply the right side to get rid of the parenthesis now we have the same thing on the left and right side let's remove it we move our knowns to the other side now which means we should remove the negative and also flip the sides because it will make things clearer and finally we divide it by 10. let's try with our average damage from before 7.5 we now get 0.43 that's 43 we now know if our hit chance without Sharpshooter would be lower than this number for this average damage we should not use Sharpshooter if you remember the null fights the hit chance without Sharpshooter is 65 so that checks out you only have to calculate this once whenever your average damage changes if you have advantage and disadvantage things change a bit for those I'd recommend either using a damage calculator like cephalon to find the breaking points that's probably the easiest like look you just put in the numbers there and it's got a fancy graph with all the AC and whatnot or if you're feeling brave you can look up the D20 probability table and figure out how much damage you could do with and without Sharpshooter at every success chance there's a lot of ways to figure this out and I think this is incredibly important for any Sharpshooter or great weapon Master builds they should absolutely know this end the video if you want to see me play boulder skates Link in the description if you want to see more content like this please like share and subscribe thank you for watching bye

Channel: Pack Tactics

Views: 27,546

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Id: rx4tSn6vbA8

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023